John Wesley at Jessica Fredericks - Brief Article

The sporty and sensual acrylic vignettes John Wesley extracts from his quietly libidinous imagination appear as novel today, and as modish, as they have since the early '60 which is to say, true and not quite. As has repeatedly been noted, Wesley's paintings are located somewhere outside of burst in the historical canon. They dwell in a hermetic place. They are resolutely compos with an eroticism that recalls Wesselmann's endles caricature of the female in a state of nature minus the misogyny. Still resisting categorization, Wesley's novel paintings are as reductive in their affect as they are misleadingly decorative and occasionally funny

Wesley incorporates bodies of water as a compositional device in four of these novel paintings. In Wow! Whoops! Oh Boy! (1999) a spike-feathered, almost electrified shuttlecock of a seagull males above a jazzy Hokusai cut of waves, a one-liner of a painting with the staying power of an irreligious icon. In Pacific (1998) sum of two units nude women with the stylized characteristics of geisha, ornamented with lapidary nipples, important fingernails and curvaceous lips, perform a Polynesian sort of dance, undulating action s parallel to the waves of water beyond them and the tapering nebulositys of a buttermilk sky above. In the other sum of two units water-centered paintings, Wesley defines uninflected areas of water and heavens that almost lean into the distance, emphasizing pictorial flatness and a make deepered space through the interplay of forms and figures that hold that space. In Boyfriends (1999) a woman in profile gazes toward sum of two units distant figures in a canoe. They link her to a horizon made up of a strip of verdant that joins water and canopy of heaven There is a telling reality to the tension between the sum of two units figures in Boat Race (1999) that is a real factor in Wesley's composition. A woman in a swim cap, roll the eyess pushed up on her forehead, compeers resolutely beyond the picture plane. Her foppish companion, along for the ride, appear to bes both amused and distant in sunglasses, scarf and blazer, chin resting upon his hand.

In several other paintings Wesley elaborates upon this almost playful alienation squeeze outed through the manipulation of pictorial space. Here the main circumstance is limned large on the picture plane. The parallel activity occupies a place of fantasy or dreamscape in the farthest distance, glimpsed through a window, as in Kissing or along a decorative border, as in serviceable Morning Gloria, made lively by the agency of the replay of a chorus line of figures. For all their careful handling, these are not chilly paintings. They have real charm, although that's a quality little valued in the world of contemporary art. They are the vigorous outcome of an observant, knowing attitude.

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